


A Short History of Nearly Nothing

by FKAHerSweetness



Series: The Wretched and the Meek [1]
Category: Zero Day (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anal Sex, Bullying, Depression, Hot boys having hot boy sex, M/M, Oneshot, Slurs, Suicide mention, Violence, Which means Oneshot, school shooting mention, what do you want from me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 07:23:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17997443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FKAHerSweetness/pseuds/FKAHerSweetness
Summary: A boy of the past and a boy of the future try to reconcile the present.





	A Short History of Nearly Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> The kind of girl you like is right here with me.

“Do you remember me?” this new kid asks, pausing just a foot from Andre’s lunch table. In the wide cafeteria overflowing with noise and students, this corner is as secluded as it gets with the only other people ten feet away, their backs to Andre. He stares up at this blue-eyed kid who made a beeline to him from the lunch line, tray in hand. He smiles and sits. “We shot up a school together.”

“ _Huh_?”

“Look me in the face.” He leans in, and there’s no need for it. Andre can see him just fine: hair like the sun, eyes like afternoon behind thin clouds. He’s the sky incarnate and Andre’d be able to see him from miles away. Hell, the kid probably glows in the dark. “It was a while ago, so maybe you don’t remember, or… before that, we weren’t on good terms, though we still killed a lot of people together. A frenemies type deal.”

“Frenemies,” Andre murmurs, feeling his eyebrows furrow. His voice is a little scratchy, unused. He rarely speaks at school, at least not to anyone his own age. “I think you got the wrong guy.”

“I’m Calvin. _Cal_. And you’re Andre. Right?”

“Yeah…”

“See, I know your name.”

“You could’ve heard anyone say that,” Andre points out. He looks down at his lunch getting cold and suddenly isn’t hungry. The kid— _Cal_ —leans back to neutral in his seat and continues staring at Andre with that placid helpful expression. Like that’d make any of this babble suddenly make sense. Andre gets that feeling again, the one he’s so used to. Eyes on him. He glances up, and those who were once entranced in their own worlds and lives and had forgotten about their local freak who always sits by himself are suddenly glancing over. There’s no way they can hear the things Cal’s babbling about but the sheer fact that Andre Kriegman isn’t alone is enough to start whispering and grinning over, apparently. The hair on the back of his neck raises and he looks at Cal who seems blissfully unaware of what’s going on. “Hey. Get out of here, go on. Shoo. You don’t wanna sit here, trust me.”

“Yeah, I do. I wanna be with you.”

“Shh! Jesus. Look, just leave me alone.”

He tilts his head, but that wispy smile doesn’t leave. “Why?” he asks.

“B-Because people’re talking about you. You just started today, you don’t wanna be lumped in with me. It’s no picnic.”

“But you’re my partner. We were lumped together since birth. Well, before birth, even.”

Andre bites his lower lip to keep himself from groaning. Around them and over Cal’s head, the kids continue to stare and Andre can feel a heat in his neck creeping up to his cheeks and maybe they all can see it because their grins widen, lengthen, like snakes reticulating, and Andre feels a little dip in his stomach at this kid who sits unaware of it all, not knowing how much his life is going to suck now because he’s crazy and decided to try and be crazy with Andre. He swallows hard, and ignores the questioning look in Cal’s eye when he gets up, leaving the cafeteria.

*

Cal Gabriel is the new hot topic in school—proven by the fact that Andre can’t even get out of the building at the end of the day without hearing a group of giggling girls talking about him. Swooning against each other and sighing over who they’re calling _Archangel Gabriel_.

Andre pushes past them, rolling his eyes like his life depends on it. _Archangel_? What a fucking crock.

But he does feel _some_ relief. It seems that having been in Andre’s close proximity for a second hasn’t infected the kid hardly—well, at all. People are looking at him for the exact opposite reasons they’ve looked at Andre. _Cute_ seems to be the general consensus, though throughout the last half of the day Andre has heard him called extremes of _God-tier_ and _girly_ . If the latter gets much traction, he’ll soon be _prissy_ and then devolve to _pussy_ once the jocks decide he’s an intolerable affront to their maleness. Andre himself never had that problem and skipped all those stepping stones to fall in the deep deep lake that is _faggot_ and he’s never been able to swim to shore.

All that’s left behind as Andre gets into his Honda in the parking lot. He sits there in the slight warmth and lowers his head to the steering wheel. There’s no telling how long he stays like that—a second or five minutes—but there’s a _plink_ on his window that whips him to sitting upright and there’s an unmistakable flash in his mind: _Cal?_

But of course not; it’s Brad Huff and his girlfriend and a few of the others on the wrestling team. Someone’s thrown a pebble to get his attention from feet away and Brad makes the following motions: head down on a raised forearm, the other hand jerking fervently at his groin. The group surrounding him all die laughing like he’s the world’s funniest comedian. Andre holds up a middle finger, decides it isn’t enough, then holds up the other as well. The group doesn’t seem to mind or notice and they all walk off to Brad’s black Range Rover.

When Andre’s home, his parents greet him with asking after his day, which he responds to with a practiced shrug and smirk.

“Fine.”

He looks back at them at the stairway down into the basement. His mom looks back in time enough to see him and she says, “Everything okay?”

_We shot up a school together._

“Peachy,” he says and strolls down into his lair. He was given the basement as living quarters once his older brother moved away for college. It felt like the world’s biggest gift and somehow an exile. Maybe his parents wanted him to be happy, feel grown up, but they wanted him doing it away from them on the top level of the house. He tries not to think about it much.

He lays down on his bed, backpack tossed into a corner, and stares up at the ceiling.

_We shot up a school together._

How did that kid know? How could he possibly know Andre’s thought of that—oh, too many times to count. Whenever someone shoulder-checks him in the hallway to a round of laughter from onlookers. Whenever someone manages to break into his locker and piss on his books. Whenever someone trips him, waits and watches as he bends to pick up his books, and then yells, “The fag’s asking for it!”

The lot of them mowed down by rifle fire or maybe something heavier, something portentous, like an AK-47. The spray of blood, the screaming, the light of recognition in their eyes as they realized, _Hey, maybe I shouldn’t’ve been such a Goddamn dick._

Andre’s sat in Chemistry, looking idly at his fellow students’ heads and imagining them popping like party balloons, confetti raining all over Andre’s boots and a giant banner falling from the ceiling that says, _Congratulations! You win!_

Andre’s stood alone in PE, bouncing a basketball, watching his fellow students running along the gymnasium and imagining shooting their kneecaps and as they all lay screaming on the floor, bloody and begging for mercy, Andre would come over to them and tell them to ask nicely, _faggot_.

Andre sighs against the fleur-de-lis pillow covers that smell like him and he moves a hand down into his jeans. Tries not to let Brad Huff’s jeering ruin it. Before he can get far, his dad’s voice is up at the top of his stairs calling, “Andre, come up, a friend is here to see you!”

“Jesus Christ...”

“Andre?”

“Yeah, I’m coming!”

A friend? It’s probably one of the nondescript assholes from school with a water gun filled with piss or sewage to shoot him with. He reaches into his nightstand drawer and grabs one of his Swiss Army knives, stuffs it into his back pocket. Harassing him at school is bad enough, but to come here and get his dad’s hopes up that he may yet be normal? Too far.

When he comes to the front door, hand already behind him to start slashing out, he sees in the mid-autumn air on his front step is Cal Gabriel, wrapped in a scarf of burnt orange wool. His hair is tousled by the wind and his cheeks are pink.

“Archangel,” Andre mutters dully.

“Huh?”

“Uh. Nothing. What’re you doing here? How’d you know where I live even?” The idea that this might be common knowledge around school is worrisome. “Who told you?”

Cal shrugs. “No one. _I’m_ not even really sure how I got here. Either I used sonar or just followed my nose.”

“Your _nose_?”

“I can recognize you by smell.”

Andre just stares at him.

Cal says, “Can I come in?”

“Uh.”

His mom suddenly makes an appearance from the kitchen and is smiling over Andre’s shoulder, waving at Cal. “Come on in, please. Andre, where are your manners? Get your friend a drink.”

“Hi, Mrs. Kriegman,” Cal chirps, stepping into the house. “Nice to see you again.”

“You too,” she says, and she’s obviously confused but pats Andre towards the kitchen. Andre’s ready to protest but when she’s gone again, Cal leans in.

“I don’t want a drink. Can we talk in your room?”

Andre tries to keep his face neutral. “If you know so much about me, why don’t you lead the way?”

Cal nods a little and takes a step further into the living room. He looks up, around. Presses a finger to his impossibly pink bottom lip and then looks back at Andre with a clouded gaze. “Sometimes you live in an attic, sometimes you live in the basement. Once, you lived in a shed out back that your dad tied you to when you caused trouble. Those were rough years.”

“Oh my God, _stop_ ,” Andre cries, shushing him, looking around wildly for any sign of his parents. He grabs Cal’s thin wrist and pulls him through the living room, the kitchen, and they pass the upward stairs where Andre can hear a snippet of his parents talking about this unprecedented arrival of a friend. Like Cal’s a foreign prince that deigned to grace Andre with his presence. Oh Jesus.

They go down into the basement and Cal hums, “A _basement_ this time, interesting,” and when they’re down in the bedroom portion, Andre releases him and whirls around.

“ _What_ ,” he says with all the heat he can summon, “do you _want_?”

“To renew our bond and realign the past and future,” Cal says.

Andre has no idea what to say to that. But then, he did ask what the kid wanted, so now he’s got to deal with this. He rubs at a temple and says, “Where the hell did you move from?”

“The distant land of Ohio.”

“I don’t think I have what you want.”

“You can see the future.”

“No, I can’t!”

“Yes, you can.”

“Please, just…” Andre sighs and sits on his bed. “Please believe me. I have a hard enough time as it is, and I’m tired. I’m not into whatever—whatever it is you’re trying to sell me.” He looks up at Cal with what he hopes is a pleading, kind expression. “I want to be left alone. You don’t have to settle for me or anything, if you’re scared of being new. People love you already. You could hang around with girls all day and watch them fawn over your… your pretty boyness.”

Cal’s placid expression shifts. He raises one light eyebrow and smirks a little. “I don’t want girls. I want my partner. My partner wants me too; I can see it.”

Andre shakes his head.

“Okay,” Cal says. He takes a knee on the hard basement floor. He takes Andre’s hands in his own and Andre is too stunned to pull back. Those huge blue eyes of his. Archangel—Hell, maybe they’re right. “Look at me, Andre. Look into the pit of my soul. If you can’t recognize me… if you can’t recognize the dozens of lives we’ve spent together, the times we’ve met… if you can’t recognize all the times we _will_ meet. Then maybe. Maybe this time I’m wrong. Maybe I came to the wrong town, the wrong school, looked at the wrong guy. I don’t think I did, but maybe. Haven’t you ever wished for things that feel so undeniably right it’s like they’ve just got to happen? And when you wished for them, didn’t you imagine someone by your side? That’s me. Always has been, always will be.”

Andre stares at him widely, and feels this strangeness in his low throat. He hasn’t cried since he was in elementary school, when a middle schooler punched him in the mouth, splitting his lips. Now when he gets beat up bad, boots held to his upper back, arms twisted, school officials not running up until he’s black and blue, he still doesn’t cry. But this makes him feel like it, for some reason. Andre swallows the feeling down, but it keeps climbing back up. If they stare at each other much longer like this, he’s going to lose his fucking mind.

Andre looks away, takes his hands back. He realizes he's sitting on something; lifts up and dislodges the Swiss Army knife from his pocket, places it on the nightstand. He heaves a sigh of surrender, “So what do I smell like anyway?”

Cal says, “An orchard.”

*

Once they get started, it’s hard not to be sucked right in. It’s downright addictive, just the sheer act of talking to someone who isn’t related to him by blood. They sit on his bed for hours going through it all: things Cal can remember of them and their past lives.

There was a time when they were actual brothers, borne by the same woman. There was a time when they were both girls, for whatever reason. There was a time they were both royal knights to an unjust queen whom they plotted to murder but she struck first. There was a time when they were assassins who got away with many covert murders. There was a time they were hellbent on robbing a huge bank and getting their act, not their faces, on the news, and they wore Scream masks and called themselves the AC Gang and when Cal tells Andre this he almost asphyxiates from laughter. Cal throws in there the time they were both madly in love but their families hated each other and kept them apart. They got together late one night and committed joint suicide and Andre looks at him and says, “Isn’t that what happens in Romeo and Juliet?”

“Yeah,” Cal says, “but it happened to us too.”

“Small world, I guess.”

They have to take a break for dinner, where Andre’s mom calls down wonderingly, asking if she should set another place. Cal sends Andre a bright questioning look. Andre calls up yes, definitely.

After a dinner of roast chicken and potatoes and string beans, Andre notices that Cal is not only fawned over by girls their own age but by older women too. Andre’s mom adores him instantly. What nice manners he has—as opposed to Andre, who belches freely at meals—and what beautiful eyes he has—which, yeah, okay—and how sociable he must be to have made friends already on his first day.

She pinches Andre’s upper arm tenderly and smiles. “I can’t imagine what magic you must hold to bring this big sulk out of his shell.”

Andre sighs and Cal beams.

11 PM sneaks up on them and when they’re in the basement again, laughing over a time when they shot up the school and Brad Huff only escaped by using his girlfriend as a human shield, Andre catches sight of the clock on his radio. “Oh, uh,” he says and sits up. “It’s getting late. Do you need to go home?”

“Do you want me to go home?”

“No,” Andre says immediately. Cal’s pulled the truth from him like a loose tooth. There’s heat at his cheeks but he doesn’t retract his answer.

“I told my mom I’d be staying the night anyway,” Cal says, smirking at the wall. “I figured…”

Andre’s stomach is full of roast chicken and happiness. He’s warm all over and they turn out the lights and lay in his almost-too-small bed and it’s just dark and quiet. Andre thinks about this morning getting dressed in this space and looking sullenly at his backpack and dreading the day. But who could have known? _Who could have known?_

Cal’s gentle scent and presence is in his bed. Just taking up a sliver of space. Andre disguises sniffing him by taking in a deep breath and tries to tell what Cal smells like. Does the galaxy have a smell? That, then.

“Cal,” he says before sleep takes him, “I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

Cal yawns, “Yeah, you have.”

*

They take up a new routine that doesn’t feel new at all. More like they’ve been doing it since the dawn of time and stopped maybe one day and picked it back up again. A stutter in time. That’s what Cal calls their deaths. The eons or seconds when they were just spacedust before becoming conscious again and something switched on in their heads, telling them to find one another.

Driving them to school, Andre asks, “Are you always the one to find me? I mean—don’t I ever recognize you first?”

“Never,” Cal says. “Well, you haven’t yet. But it makes sense because I can remember seeing you so many times before. I don’t know for sure, but I guess your memory gets wiped every time we die. Though… I guess it makes sense, if you can only see the future and not the past.” He looks over at Andre. “What do you think?”

Andre just shrugs, shoves those things to a back and corner. He doesn’t want to feel like a broken part of their interactions—Cal has made it clear that Andre is supposed to be some future-seeing marvel but Andre is just Andre and the only things he sees are the things he wants.

Right now, for the first time in his life, he sees his days the way they _are_ : him waking up sometimes at his own house, sometimes at Cal’s, then driving the two of them to school. Their classes aren’t all the same which fills Andre with a nameless ache when Cal is elsewhere and a devastating serenity when they’re reunited. In Spanish, lunch period and PE, they sit or do their activities together. Instead of bouncing a basketball alone, Andre throws it to Cal who isn’t great at catching but tries. Instead of eating alone or skipping lunch altogether to save himself the gnawing embarrassment, he trades his dessert for Cal’s starch. Instead of dreading the halls for fear of harassment, he’s too busy searching the crowds for that burnished halo of blond hair.

Cal asked the office for a trade of lockers, to one beside Andre’s which Andre only finds out one morning when Cal follows him there and posts up against his new locker like a pin-up model.

“Nice ta meetcha, neighbor,” he says and winks.

Andre _cannot_ believe his luck.

Surely this must be God or _the gods_ all conspiring, looking on Andre’s sad little life they unfairly doled out to him, and deciding to hurl down a handcrafted angel to keep him from offing himself. He wouldn’t dare say something so incredibly sappy to Cal but he surely communicates it with his eyes every day. He can’t help it. It leaks from him. Boundless gratitude.

And Cal seems equally enthralled, happy to share his stories of their times together, hanging out of the window of Andre’s car and howling at the barely visible moon as they roll down the morning-dewed streets to school.

The only thing is.

Is.

Cal’s fallen in the lake with Andre.

Yesterday, Andre heard it and didn’t know he could get so angry. They were walking down the hall together towards lunch and some asshole said at a reasonable pitch, “There goes Fag One and Fag Two.”

A few of his friends laughed and it rippled out into a bigger joint guffaw. Andre whipped his head around instantly and Cal grabbed his wrist. But the asshole saw this and pointed. “Aw, cute! She’s trying to stop her boyfriend!”

Cal hurriedly took his hand away. Andre saw the confused flush to his eyes and couldn’t stop himself from launching onto the asshole, the two of them falling to the linoleum in a whirl of fists and nails and fruitless kicking. A crowd formed around them which Andre took notice of only in that his head kept bumping into people’s knees. A chant of “fight, fight, fight” roared up and through the ringing of Andre’s ears as the kid punched him and the chanting, Andre made out a clear chime of a voice calling his name. The kid on top of him banged his head back against the floor and he saw light bursting through like the sun through leaves and he saw Cal’s face, his pink-tinted cheeks and open mouth against the pattern of Andre’s pillowcases.

It was hard to tell who won the fight. Andre inspected himself in a bathroom mirror first and then, sitting in the principal’s office, saw that the other kid looked pretty similar to Andre. Both black-eyed, cuts on their foreheads, their cheeks, but apparently in the tumult Andre bit him which he never remembered doing. The kid had a small chunk of skin taken out of his arm with angry red tooth marks surrounding it.

Andre got out-of-school suspension for two days.

Sitting in the car after school, Andre smelled faintly of blood and antiseptic and he glanced over at Cal in the passenger’s seat.

“Did I embarrass you?” Andre asked. “You can say if I did.”

“What?” Cal looked over. “No. I tried to stop you because it doesn’t matter what they say about us.”

“You took your hand away.”

“Yeah.”

“So it obviously does matter.”

“To you.”

“Yeah, to me, and to you too.”

Cal’s brow furrowed. “I just said it didn’t. I knew this would happen, that you’d get suspended. Now what am I going to do the next two days? If you were worried about us getting called names together, think about what it’ll be like for me on my own.”

“Well, pardon the fuck out of me for standing up for us.”

Cal leaned over and put his hand on Andre’s forearm. “I’ll _miss_ you, idiot,” he said.

Andre attempted to keep his heart from back-flipping around his ribcage. He cleared his throat. “It’s just two days, Cal.”

Cal gripped him, harder. “I already went sixteen years. You didn’t know about me, but I knew about you. Every day without you was torture. I could feel it in every part of my body.”

Andre exhaled, “Holy shit.”

“Yeah, holy shit.”

“Well, fuck, Cal… what do you want me to do about it? Go back in there and beg Principal Downey to rethink my suspension because you’ll be lonely?”

Cal seemed to consider this as an option. His grip on Andre lessened but he didn’t take his hand away and there in the car, it felt like years were passing in flippant disregard of all the laws of time and space. Cal said, finally, “I got an idea.”

*

He said he wouldn’t tell Andre until after the first day of suspension. But even after that, when Andre pulls up to the front of the school and Cal comes out into the bluster of a late afternoon storm, he just says, “Don’t be so impatient.” He glances at Andre’s miffed expression as they drive down the wet streets and asks, “Did your parents throw a huge fit about the suspension?”

“Nah,” Andre says, turning the wheel. “I spent the whole day out at a park in White Hill. As far as they know, I went to school.” He motions into the backseat where his backpack has been all day.

“Didn’t they notice how beat up you are?”

“Sure. I said I won a fight. Mom didn’t like it; Dad said at least I won.”

Cal presses a hand to his smile. “You won, huh?”

Andre glares over at him. “I did win!”

“Uh huh.”

Cal’s said they can’t go to his place—not for this. They go to Andre’s and his parents are milling around, smiling upon seeing Cal who is their new favorite thing. Andre’s mom asks if they’d like a snack and Andre tells her they aren’t ten. Cal snickers on their way down into the basement but Andre’s noticed this: since he picked up Cal at school, his hands have been shaking. Fingers atremble the whole time. It might be that he’s been nervous all day, or maybe something happened. Maybe he was picked on to within an inch of his life and only isn’t saying anything about it because he thinks it’ll start another Andre rampage. He’d be right. But Andre wants to know anyway—the idea of Cal keeping anything from him is like sucking on sour candies.

When they’re in the safety of Andre’s room, Cal sits on the bed and says, “Close the door.”

Andre looks at him and does as he’s told. When they’re shut securely from anyone else, Andre says, “Did something happen today?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, did anyone hurt you? Call you names?”

Cal is quiet.

“Cal!”

“Sit here,” he says and pats the comforter next to him.

Andre sighs and goes to sit. He levels Cal a scrutinizing gaze and says, “I hate this. I hate not knowing what’s going on with you. We should be together all the time.”

“I know. But we can’t be.”

“I know,” Andre says and shame coats him a bit, because of course they can’t be together all the time. He just got done telling his mom he isn’t ten but what a ten-year-old thing to wish for. He and Cal are separate people living their own lives. But then why does he want to burn his skin and Cal’s skin into one sticky mass forever fused? Why does he want it so _badly_?

Cal places his hand on Andre’s forearm and draws their gazes together. “That’s what this is about though. We can’t be together all the time, we can’t even relay everything we’re thinking without wasting time and energy. It’s, uh, ineffective. We have to do something instant. It's a way to synch our information, that will jog your ability to see the future again. I know you haven’t been having visions.”

Andre ducks his head instinctively, looks away. Like he’s been caught in a lie. But he never said he could see the future.

“It’s okay,” Cal resumes. He moves his fingers lightly on Andre’s arm, like petting. “I don’t mind.”

“Has that ever happened before? That I have trouble seeing the future?”

“More times than not, really.”

He relaxes a little. Then he’s not a defective Andre, he’s just an Andre. It’s better too because Cal knows a way to help him along. “So, what do we do?”

Cal leans his head on Andre’s shoulder. Andre’s breath stutters low in his lungs. He can’t see Cal’s face beneath his golden bangs, but can feel the warmth of his cheek through shirt fabric.

“You trust me, right?”

“More than I ever trusted anyone,” Andre says.

“Then let’s sync,” Cal whispers, his hand on Andre’s belt buckle.

*

After, they’re both naked and coated in sweat and panting and staring at the bubble plaster ceiling of the basement. Andre’s mind is… barren.

“You okay?” Cal asks, soft. His gentle voice in this place deep underground is a holy sacrament. Andre feels the world going round beneath him, the earth’s molten core churning, the resounding shock-waves of a pebble being dropped into the Pacific.

“Yeah,” Andre says. He licks the sweat from his top lip and allows himself to look over at Cal’s pale body in the lamplight. “Can I ask you something?”

Cal snorts. “Sure.”

“Was that your first time ever, uh… syncing?”

“In this life? Yeah.”

“You seemed… like you knew what was what.”

Cal bursts into riotous laughter—so sudden and loud that Andre nearly falls off the bed. He scoots away a little and stares wide-eyed as Cal holds his thin stomach, scrunched onto his side facing Andre. His eyes brim with tears, his face is red.

Andre says, flustered, “What’s so funny?”

“ _You_ ,” Cal cries and swallows and tries to settle himself. He lays on his side, gulping air. “You smooth-talker. Is this your way of saying you liked it?”

Andre tries not to blush, in vain. “Uh. Well, yeah.”

Cal clears his throat and sits up. He’s naked and unashamed and why shouldn’t he be? Archangel Gabriel. Some girls still call him that, where their boyfriends can’t hear. They’ll never know how right they are and that fills Andre with a gelatinous pride. Cal scoots closer to him, eyelids lowered, and says, “I liked it too. I always do.”

“Man. I wish I could remember the other times we synced.”

“You don’t have to remember. We’ll just keep doing it. And everything you are and everything I am will fall in line,” he says and Andre’s hard again and Cal pulls him over.

*

It’s all Andre can think about. It’s _all_ Andre can _think about_.

And he feels so dirty when he looks at Cal in Spanish and he asks if Andre knows what this sentence is saying, Andre just stares at that cherry mouth and thinks of him moaning, “Fuck, yes, Andre, please,” in the heat of their syncing and Andre has to cross his legs beneath the table. There’s no longer a pure moment in his day. He relishes the time spent in class or lunch with Cal but now being separated has its perks too. Sometimes after class, walking through the hall after two periods apart, Cal will look up with those big innocent eyes and say, “I can’t wait to sync tonight,” and Andre will nearly go into cardiac arrest.

One day during lunch, when Andre’s been considering just how Cal behaves, he can’t help but ask: “So, uh… do you ever watch porn, or…?”

“What?” Cal’s head pops up, eyebrows knitted. “No!”

“Oh.”

“Why? You got some you wanna share?”

“No, but—uh, you just seem—”

“Seem _what_?” And he looks so honestly confused and a little affronted that Andre drops the whole thing.

But Jesus Christ, the way he _sounds_. Andre’s had to shush him a little and it pains him to do it because the way Cal moans and talks dirty is a revelation but he’s worried that even through the walls his parents might hear something questionable. How is he supposed to pass off Cal saying, “You’re so good, it’s so much, it’s perfect”? He could say he’s beating Cal in a video game but how dumb are his parents really?

He’s got no idea where Cal gets this stuff if he isn’t watching porn. Sometimes Andre will lay prone on the bed and Cal will ride him; he’ll lean back on his hands planted on either side of Andre’s thighs and roll his hips down with this languid undulation. His hip bones jut out and Andre can’t help but grip them. Andre never lasts long in this position—never lasts long in any position, who is he trying to fool. Cal unstitches him expertly, in a way no sixteen-year-old boy has any business doing to any other sixteen-year-old boy. But he guesses this is all just a result of so many remembered lives; of course Cal would know how to take Andre apart if he’s done it so many times.

The only downside is this: Cal forbids kissing. Andre shouldn’t feel so down about it; if anyone at school knew he wanted to kiss Cal and was moping about it—Hell, if anyone knew what they were generally doing—they’d beat the living daylights out of him. Still, Andre does think about it often: whenever there’s a quiet moment between the two of them, he wishes he could fill it in that way. When they sync it’s ten times as hard. That first time, when Andre was so overcome with _this_ , doing _this_ , with _Archangel Gabriel_ , he leaned down on an inward thrust and wanted to kiss him and come in him at the same time. It seemed appropriate. But the second before their lips met, Cal slid his thin fingers between them, letting Andre kiss those instead. He threw his arms around Andre’s neck and whispered through heavy breathing, “N-No, it’s—too much, Andre—fuck—we—it—Andre—”

When Andre finally brought it up, Cal explained that the whole wide world might very well end. They were too powerful together and there was one time in a past life where they kissed and a few cities crumbled and the oceans depleted by a foot and a half.

“A foot and a half might not sound like much,” he stated, “but there were repercussions, believe me.”

He said it might even end their lives prematurely and that keeps Andre from trying again. No way is he going to jeopardize his life just when he’s just found a reason to live. He isn’t stupid.

Syncing with Cal has changed a lot of things. For one, he thinks if he ever has to go back to jacking off, he’ll probably cry. For two, he’s been getting in more and more fights as the very sight of Cal being tormented drives him deep into a rage he’s only before scraped the crust of. And for three—

“You don’t wanna shoot up the school anymore,” Cal says conversationally one afternoon at PE. The two of them are dressed out in athletic red shorts and grey t-shirts like the rest of the class. In March the weather has become tolerable enough for outside class and they walk leisurely around the track as the other kids keep far ahead. Andre looks over at Cal and Cal just shrugs. “I can feel it; when we’re syncing, you know. You don’t want to do it anymore, you don’t even talk about it. Why?”

Andre’s yet to get over the little thrill that comes when Cal mentions syncing so openly. He nods. “Yeah, well. It worked. I finally had a vision about it.”

Cal’s whole face lights up and Andre feels like a heel for lying but he can’t take it back now. Cal goes to grab his arm and then stops, seemingly realizing they’re in public. He elbows Andre amicably instead. “That’s great! Andre, you’re returning to your true self.”

“Mmhmm.”

“This is always my favorite part,” he says with a happy sigh. He raises one eyebrow and smirks. “We’re gonna sync like crazy tonight.”

“Jesus, Cal.”

Cal laughs, grinning wide. “So? Tell me about your vision!”

Andre can’t look at Cal and lie so he stares straight ahead, at the backs of his peers as they walk and laugh and act like idiots. All unaware that he’s saved their miserable lives for no other reason than that he can’t think of a way to get out of a shooting alive and with Cal. Cal’s said they’ve died in shootings before and Andre has no idea what kind of idiot he’s been in his past life but he won’t be risking Cal’s safety in this one. He says, “I saw that we don’t do it, plain and simple. We stand and fight when we’re fucked with, but we don’t do the shooting. That kind of thing just ends in death. Not just for them, but us too.”

He chances a look at Cal and he seems thoughtful. “That’s true. We never get out of that alive. But sometimes we don’t care.”

“This time we do.”

Cal nods lightly, closes his eyes. He says, “One time, you thought we would get out alive. I knew we wouldn’t. But I let you think we would, until the time came for us to pull the triggers on ourselves. You were scared, but I helped you through it. It’s one of my most cherished memories. Looking into your eyes in the morning light seconds before we blew our beautiful brains out. How soft your voice was.”

Hoarfrost coats the bottom of Andre’s stomach. He shivers and says, “I don’t know how I could’ve been so stupid, to think we’d just—just walk out.”

“You weren’t stupid.” Cal opens his eyes again and stops. He places a hand on Andre’s shoulder and clasps it. “You’re a hopeful person. That’s why you can see the future. That’s why I’m drawn to you again and again.”

Andre can’t help his smile. No one’s ever called him _a hopeful person_. He’s never believed himself to be. But because Cal is saying it, it must be true, and Andre believes it to his marrow.

Cal tilts his head a little, then snaps his whole body into a strange soldier salute. “Sir! How do we stand and fight, sir?”

Andre blinks, then snorts softly.

*

Their first target is Brad Huff and Andre would be lying if he said it wasn’t for personal reasons. Besides the fact that Brad has been on his case for the last four years, since they were just seventh graders, he’s lately hopped on the bandwagon of fucking with Cal for his looks. In the last couple of months, it’s become fashionable amongst the male assholes in school to start referring to Cal as a she, as The Fag’s Girlfriend, or just Girlfriend for short. Cal is shamefully good at ignoring people, far better than Andre ever will be, but Andre’s seen the way he winces or the veiled expression of shame as he keeps his back to those idiots yelling at him. But Brad. Brad’s been pushing it harder than everyone else—last week, he tripped Cal and said something about his skirt flying over his head. Andre took a step toward him and felt something on his leg. He looked down to find Cal gripping his jeans with such a desperate look in his eye that Andre deflated, sighing.

He’s been getting good at reading Cal. Must be all the syncing. He knows Cal would be furious if Andre got another suspension, leaving him alone in that white-washed, fluorescently-lit cage they call a school. And Andre won’t do anything to make Cal angry or worse: lonely. So.

Mission One is:

The two of them out past midnight. The air is cooler in the dark and Cal’s got one of Andre’s heavier jackets on. Who comes from Ohio without proper weather wear? He’s also been complaining a little about not being able to see in the glow of the world’s smallest flashlight but Andre insisted that waving around a searchlight in the dark while rooting around in enemy bushes wasn’t a great idea. Andre can only make out a lining of Cal most times but it’s enough—and he was wrong. Cal doesn’t glow in the dark, not really, but Andre is aware of his every move anyway. Before they left his house, he gave Cal one of his many Swiss Army knives and told him not to poke his eye out. Cal frowned, pocketed it. Maybe he thought Andre was making fun of him but Andre’s sure he’s never known true regret until he met Cal. Losing his temper and leaving him alone in a school of coyotes for two days tore him up, and if he were to supply the instrument in Cal hurting himself? Irreparably damaging one of his moonbeam eyes?

The thought makes him want to puke.

They’re at Brad Huff’s house, 10 Wisteria Drive, which Andre shown his light on the mailbox to verify. Everyone knows where the big idiot lives because he has, apparently, the best ragers in the county. Andre’s of course never been but he’s heard about it in his furtive way, listening in the locker room or out in the halls. Vodka, beer pong, weed and sometimes coke if anyone was able to score. Brad often tows his girlfriend and her friends out to other satellite towns for barn parties where there’s no adult around for miles. There’s one coming up this weekend, and Andre has decided they will be sadly missing out.

The Range Rover’s sitting big and hulking in the driveway, blacker than the sky above. Cal’s moved around to the back of it, and Andre scuttles to the front. The night is silent, dead. They can hear each other whisper: “Three… two… one!”

Andre slashes the left one first, then slides over for the right. The knife’s stuck a little on the first puncture and Andre didn’t anticipate the pressure of the air being let out. It blows on him in a low hiss and the car’s sinking fast. Cal’s up beside him quickly, half crouched. Andre flashes the light up to his eyes and they shine like a cat’s. The pupils narrow impossibly.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says.

Andre nods, breathless. They sneak off into the dark, past the line of bushes that separates one Wisteria Drive house from the next. Andre parked two streets down to avoid suspicion. They run to the car suppressing helpless laughter, and when they take off down the road, Andre’s heartbeat is throbbing his whole head.

“I can’t believe we did that,” Cal cries. Andre looks over at him holding his hands up to his mouth, trying to hide a smile. He says again, “I can’t believe we did that!”

Andre just laughs. “You can believe us shooting our classmates and robbing banks and being royal knights but can’t believe we slashed some fucko’s tires?”

Cal shakes his head. He’s trembling all over. In the rolling streetlights over Cal’s body, illuminating him and darkening him in turns, his eyes look wet. “No, it was—” He swallows heavily. “This was so much better than all that other stuff. This is—this is—”

“In the present?”

He stops. They roll to a stoplight. Cal is red all over. “Right. And the present always beats the past. One hundred percent.”

Andre considers this. “Yeah. It beats the future too.” When Cal says nothing, Andre asks, “So, what do you wanna do now? I think I’m too wired to sleep.”

Cal perks up.

*

Cal’s legs are thrown over Andre’s shoulders. His whole lithe body curled beneath Andre against the bare bottom sheet; comforters and pillows tossed away or fallen to the wayside. Andre looks down at him gasping open-mouthed, eyes half-closed, wet lips against the fleur-de-lis pattern of the sheet and Andre’s back muscles tighten, his biceps tighten, he grits his teeth.

“Cal, it’s—it’s so hard not to—not to—fuck,” he says and grabs Cal’s chin with one hand. So delicate. So breakable. There’s a flash of understanding—people calling Cal girly, a she. But he isn’t one, he’s better. Girls would never pal around with him like this, understand him like this. Girls would never take it this hard.

Cal moans when Andre thrusts into him again and nods like he knows. Like he wants it too. So what if the world would end? If the world ends with Andre and Cal syncing, that’s a Hell of a lot more fun than nuclear war or aliens invading. It’d be like something out of Genesis.

Cal’s mouth looks like a fucking oasis.

If.

If they.

“No,” Cal says, whines, “Andre—my—kiss me anywhere else—”

Andre groans, growls, whatever that noise he just made was, and leans down to put Cal’s shoulder in his mouth and they come like that, threaded through each other.

When Andre can think clearly again, he lays the back of a hand against Cal’s sweaty chest and says, “Hey, man. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve tried to—” He glances over at Cal’s shoulder and sees his own teeth marks, bright red against the alabaster skin. His stomach drops. “Holy shit, Cal, I didn’t mean to bite you! I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t say sorry. It felt good! I wanted, um—” Cal presses his lips together, looks off. “Syncing is… really something.”

“Preaching to the choir...” He runs a hand back through his hair and sighs. “I had a vision, I think, before we started syncing. Like, that day I got suspended. Remember? I was fighting that guy, and he punched my head and I saw something, and it really came true.”

Cal blinks. He props himself up on an elbow and looks at Andre. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. It, uh. It was you. You, the way you were just now.”

Cal crumbles back to the mattress in giggles. “ _That_ was your first vision? You wanting to sync with me?”

“Best vision I’ve had yet,” he says, grinning. Inly, cringing: _Only vision I’ve had yet._

*

Their missions continue and they’re _glorious_. The next and last two months of their junior year are filled with catastrophe for their classmates and bliss for Andre and Cal and, best of all, they didn’t have to die to get revenge. Andre is bubbling over with pride. Cal looks at him like he hung the moon as Andre tells him his visions of what they’re to do next. They sneak into the gymnasium early in the morning and rip open the mats used for the wrestling team’s home meets. Stuff glass stink bombs inside and even go to the meet in the evening to see the looks on Brad Huff and all his cronies’ faces. Their home coach and the away coach get into it over dirty practices, both accusing the other of sabotage. Andre and Cal have to hurry outside and cry on the grass, tears of unbridled joy.

Then there’s the time Cal comes to Andre and says a few of the cheerleaders have been throwing their panties at him, saying he should put some on. Andre feels his blood simmer, and does a performative count to ten. A day later, he has a vision and they act quickly: infiltrating the girls’ locker room on the day of a football game and finding the back room where the pristine cheer outfits are kept. Andre and Cal work quietly, quickly, to let out just enough of the stitches. When they’re satisfied with their work, they leave, only to return to the bleaches at night when the stadium lights are burning in the dark and when the cheerleaders do their splits, everything comes down and apart. Surprised and thrilled cheers from boys in the stands, horrified cries from the girls’ parents and boyfriends. The girls themselves curl in and make a run for the gymnasium and Andre and Cal grip each other’s hands beneath the bleachers, digging their nails in to keep calm.

Students talk about the strange things happening, looking around in worried unawares, while Andre and Cal walk through the halls happy and silent, sharing pride between them like a hot beverage.

At lunch, on the second to last day of school, Cal passes over his cup of rice and Andre slides his tapioca pudding.

Cal says, “I just sometimes wish people knew. You know? That the reason this stuff is happening to them is because they were jerks to us. This doesn’t make them… stop.”

“I know. It’s just… one more year. One more year, and we can do worse and worse stuff. Maybe one day we will tell them.” He thinks about it, and his stomach grims as it has come to do when he lies to Cal: “Actually, I had a vision about it. On the last day of our senior year, we _will_ tell them.”

Cal smiles, big and bright. “Really? That’s amazing!”

“Yeah,” Andre murmurs and pushes around his rice with a spork.

Though this may never come to pass. On whatever day that Cal finally realizes Andre’s been lying this entire time about having visions—and worse, directing them with pure fantasy, making light of Cal’s ability to see their past, Andre gets the feeling Cal isn’t going to want to be associated with him or share any of the blame for these doings. It has swung over Andre like a scythe, in his lonely moments: when he drops Cal off at home for the night, in Chemistry where his only partner is an unwilling girl who’s been forced there by the teacher, or in the shower where he’s got nothing to hide behind. The things he imagines: Cal’s eyes widening, Cal’s frown, Cal turning away from him. No more conversation, no more lunches together, no more syncing or smiles or sleepy morning drives to school. No more Cal. And it’s coming for him like a comet.

He’s just going to have to say it. He can’t get caught in some tangled idiot lie and let Cal find out that way. He’s just going to have to man up and say it and let the dominoes fall and if Cal decides to never see him again, well, there’s always his dad’s rifle Andre can suck.

Their last day of school is a halfie and Andre stands at the end of the social studies hall, waiting for Cal. He leans up against their lockers as the midday sunlight trickles through the windows at the end of the hall. Kids and teachers alike have abandoned this building like it was on fire, like people really were shooting it up.

It’s twelve-thirty. The hall’s now deserted and Andre stands away from the lockers, looking around. Cal’s usually pretty timely and he’s been talking all morning about getting home for some “summer celebration syncing”, which he kept repeating, relishing how Andre blushed each time.

He leaves the social studies wing behind and goes instead to Cal’s last class—Trig. It’s on the other side of the building facing the back parking lot, and Andre guesses maybe Cal’s hanging out by his car already. But this hallway’s just as desolate as the rest of the school. Looking out through the glass doors into the grassy patch of land before the parking lot, he squints into the sun shying behind clouds. Seeing the future would be really convenient right about now. Andre touches the door handle and pushes it open just as a hot breath of air whisks in and a scream with it, and another voice which Andre recognizes from his every waking moment. He’s out of the building, rounding the corner where Cal’s continued stream of little cries come from and when he sees him there against the brick of the building, shirt torn nearly in half and hanging on his frame, it takes a second for Andre to even be concerned with the kid crumbled down in front of him.

“Cal!”

“Andre,” Cal says and tries to fix his shirt with the hand that’s not holding the Swiss Army knife. His fingertips are coated in blood. “He tore my shirt and—he saw these.” Cal doesn’t even need to motion to them—they’ve been accumulating steadily over the past couple of months. The bite marks Andre’s been peppering along Cal’s collarbone, shoulders, chest. Low enough so that they can’t be seen when he has his shirt on, but—

The kid on the ground groans and Andre recognizes him through the pained scrunch of his face. They got into a fight all those months ago, both suspended. Andre’s bite mark was on him as well.

Cal’s voice is warbling, trying to find its normal pitch: “Andre, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Andre says immediately. He feels little, save a dab of urgency. The kid’s bleeding out, the grass around him is turning a shiny red. Cal got him in the gut. “It’s okay. Cal, he had it coming.”

“What do I do?”

“We,” Andre corrects. He comes to him, and takes the knife from his trembling hand. Closes it, then places it into Cal’s front pocket. “What do we do. And you tell me—we did this before, right? We got out of it fine back then, so… let’s just repeat ourselves.”

Cal looks at him. Cal’s hands are shaking.

“Cal, calm down,” Andre says and takes his wrists gently in hand. “Breathe. Just remember. Tell me what to do, we _can_ do this again.”

His blue eyes turn from summer sky to frost. Wet and overflowing. His nose is red.

“Cal, what’s wrong? Look, he’s dying, we need to figure—”

“Andre, Andre, none of it’s true, I made it all up, we never did any of that stuff—” He releases this great frightening sob, eyes round and streaked red with infinitesimal veins, mouth caved in grief. “I just met you when I—I saw you and I—w-w-wanted to talk to you so—”

Andre stares at him, the way his lips move, stumbling over themselves.

“—you were s-so nice to me and I wanted to—to—”

He throws down Cal’s wrists and takes a wide step back. “You fucking lied to me! Fucking shit!”

“Andre, I’m sorry—”

That first night. Hours spent. Andre turning so easily from suspicion to wanting to believe to believing. Cal had him in one night. Jesus, how must he have looked sitting alone at lunch? So pathetic that he’d believe wild stories about him and some boy living all their lives together? That he’d believe he could see the future?

A laugh tumbles out of Andre. From where, how come, he’s got no idea. There are starlings singing above them, high in the trees. When Andre looks down at that kid, he can see his arm and the spot where Andre bit him. Would he have always borne that mark? Until he was very old? He’s dead now.

Andre looks back up at Cal and says, “I was feeling like shit, you know. I wasn’t having any visions at all and I thought I was broken and you’d find out and hate me. But really, you were just yanking my leg the whole Goddamn time.”

Cal just cries. Andre still feels like shit. What kind of asshole makes Cal Gabriel cry? He’s thought that about other people, he can’t help but think it about himself.

Andre growls, balls his fists. “Stop! Stop crying!”

Cal shakes his head, cries with blood on his hands.

“This is your fault, you’ve got no reason to cry!”

He nods, tears flying.

“Jesus, Cal, please stop, you… you…” Andre groans, rubs his face in his hands. He can barely think with Cal making all this racket. He stamps one shoe into the kid’s blood. “Cal, you idiot, you could’ve been okay! Popular, even! As soon as you walked in, people liked you, wanted to see what you were like! What the fuck did you do this for? You ruined your life by getting near me! I _infected_ you!”

“What makes you think I wanted to be popular?” Cal shouts, his voice reedy and worn. “I just wanted to be your friend! So what if you infected me? I wanted—I want it! I want to be sick with you!”

He stops, chest heaving. Andre’s holding his breath, probably will pass out soon if he doesn’t take in air. But the starlings have all stopped, and it feels like there isn’t anyone around for miles. The whole town’s been emptied—quarantined. Just these two sick kids together and the things they’ve done, haven’t done.

Andre sees Cal in his pastel colors. He says, “Why didn’t you want me to kiss you?”

“This,” Cal says. His shirt in tatters, him in tatters. “I knew it’d end. I thought—that, I wouldn’t be able to handle.”

“Oh my fucking God.”

There’s silence between them, this moment stretching to infinity and then fizzling out when Andre kicks the kid at his feet. Kicks him again, and again, until he’s rolled lightly out of the way, and Andre takes Cal’s shoulders in hand, shoves him against the brick wall.

He levels him a dangerous look and asks, “Does that mean you lied about watching porn too?”

Cal blinks at him. His mouth’s trembling for a long time until it settles into a smile. “Y-Yeah...?”

“Great. Just great,” Andre sighs and places his mouth to the groove of Cal’s. Around them, time fills like water in an aquarium. Starlings return to their nests. Whole civilizations are built and crumble in the time it takes them to open their mouths and Andre tastes candy cane and Ohio and ancient ruins and stardust. The dam of isolation bursts. Somewhere in the past, Andre cries when punched in the mouth. He wishes for _some_ thing and something arrives. And Cal was wrong, of course: the world doesn’t end at all. It begins.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

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